The Old Man and Mr. Smith Read online

  ‘All right,’ she barked. Such women, and sergeants of both sexes, always start any disagreeable military litany with these two words. ‘Which one of you two is Smith?’

  ‘Him,’ said the Old Man.

  ‘One at a time!’

  ‘Me,’ said Smith.

  ‘That’s more like it, young man.’

  ‘It’s not my real name, nor am I young.’

  ‘You’re down as Smith on the police report, and you got no right to change it. If you didn’t want to be called Smith, you should have thought of that before you got yourself on the computer. Now, you’re Smith for life. Religion?’

  Smith began a long, silent peel of laughter, during which his lanky figure shuddered with a suppressed and evidently painful rhythm.

  ‘I’m waiting, Smith.’

  ‘Catholic!’ he screeched, as though posing for El Greco.

  ‘I won’t allow you to say such things!’ thundered the Old Man.

  ‘One at a time!’

  ‘No, no. It’s too much. Why do you have to know our religion in any case?’

  Miss McGiddy closed her eyes for a moment, as though registering the fact that she was so used to dealing with idiots that it wasn’t lightweights like these who were going to get her down.

  ‘We do it,’ she replied, as though dictating for schoolchildren, ‘so as if one of you seniors should see fit to pass away while in our hospital, we will know in which church to bury him or where to send the ashes in the event of incineration.’

  ‘We haven’t died for centuries. Why on earth should we develop the habit now?’ asked the Old Man.

  Miss McGiddy glanced at Captain Gonella, who shrugged it off with a look full of meaning. Miss McGiddy nodded briefly.

  ‘OK,’ she said to the Old Man, ‘we’ll give your friend a rest, and turn to you. You are Mr Godfrey.’

  ‘No,’ replied the Old Man, coldly.

  ‘That’s what it says here.’

  ‘It is bad enough that we are forced by circumstances over which we have no control to manufacture money – but this continual fibbing is beginning to annoy me. My name is God, pure and simple. God, with a capital “G”, if you feel inclined to be polite.’

  Miss McGiddy raised a quizzical orange eyebrow. ‘You expect me to be surprised?’ she enquired. ‘We have three inmates undergoing treatment right here who believe they’re God. We have to keep them apart for their own safety.’

  ‘I do not believe I am God,’ said the Old Man. ‘I am God.’

  ‘That’s what the others said. We call them God One, Two and Three. D’you want to be God Four?’

  ‘I am every God, from minus infinity to plus infinity. There are no others!’

  ‘Keep him away from the others. I’ll call Dr Kleingeld,’ Miss McGiddy informed Captain Gonella.

  The Old Man looked at the Captain, who smiled.

  ‘There are seven hundred and twelve men and four women in the United States who believe they’re God. FBI figures. That includes Guam and Puerto Rico, of course. You got plenty of competition.’

  ‘How many claim to be Satan?’ asked Mr Smith suddenly.

  ‘That’s a new one on me,’ replied Gonella. ‘None that I know of.’

  ‘It’s wonderful to feel exclusive,’ Mr Smith said softly, with a little camp preen, to the Old Man’s evident annoyance.

  ‘Is that who you are? Satan?’ laughed Gonella. ‘Great, great. Satan Smith. I’d like to have been at your baptism. What was it, total immersion, in fire? OK, Miss McGiddy, just mark down the essentials we know about, I’ll countersign the entry form. We gotta get a move on—’

  ‘The essentials?’

  ‘God and Satan. It’s a bumper day for us. We oughta feel proud.’

  ‘I’ve already marked Mr Godfrey and Mr Smith, and that’s the way it’s going to stay.’

  ‘OK, OK, it’s all phoney anyways, whichever way you look at it.’

  ‘How’s about the statutory deposit?’

  ‘We’ll handle that, unless you’re prepared to take counterfeit?’

  ‘Are you kidding?’

  With this frosty badinage, the two captives were led to their physical examinations prior to their interview with Dr Mort Kleingeld, the renowned psychiatrist, author of The If, the It, and the I, as well as the more popular and accessible, All You Need to Know about Insanity.

  They tried to take the Old Man’s pulse, but couldn’t find it. They made X-rays, and nothing appeared on the plates. In the words of Dr Benaziz, the co-ordinator of the examining team, ‘We found no heart, no ribs, no vertebrae, no veins, no arteries, and, I am glad to report, no signs of disease.’

  Among the remarks on the report was the observation that the Old Man’s skin had at moments the consistency of ‘ceramics’, at other moments ‘a rubbery feel quite unlike that of human flesh’. He appeared to be capable of changing his texture at will.

  Mr Smith caused even greater perplexity, owing to the astonishing heat he emanated when stripped, including little puffs of smoke which burst almost imperceptibly from his blackened pores, filling the ward with a vague and unpleasant smell of sulphur, and this although he was normally ice cold to the touch.

  They tried to take his temperature, but the thermometer exploded in his mouth. He cheerfully munched the glass, and swallowed the mercury as though it were a thimbleful of a rare vintage. They tried to place a replacement thermometer in his armpit, but once again it blew up. The last resort was a rectal thermometer, and he joyfully turned his body over in bed, since he was by inclination an exhibitionist. The doctor came back to the others with the alarming news, ‘No rectum.’

  ‘Come on,’ cried Gonella, ‘he’s got to be hiding it someplace.’

  ‘Have you any ideas where?’ asked the exasperated Dr Benaziz.

  ‘There’s people had operations, shit out their hips, am I right?’

  ‘That’s even more evident than an outlet in the place nature intended.’

  ‘Christ!’ cried Gonella, now losing his temper. ‘Let’s get them to the shrink. That’s what we brought them here for. We know they’s alive, and they don’t look like they’s at death’s door. If they do, they’ve been at death’s door so long it don’t make no difference. We need the evidence of the shrink.’

  ‘You won’t get that in a hurry,’ remarked Dr Benaziz. ‘Kleingeld takes his time.’

  ‘Everyone’s time,’ commented another doctor.

  ‘Everyone’s money,’ added a third.

  ‘Everyone’s time is everyone’s money,’ stated Dr Benaziz.

  * * *

  Dr Kleingeld was a man of small stature with a disproportionately large head, who spoke in whispers. He evidently thought it expedient to dominate his clients by undercutting their volume, by making them strain to hear, by inducing in them the feeling that if they so much as breathed too hard, they might miss something. He studied his notes from the depths of an all-embracing easy chair with a smile of self-assurance and superior knowledge on his thin lips. The chair was only just slightly more erect than the couch on which the Old Man was stretched.

  ‘How do you like my couch?’ Dr Kleingeld whispered.

  ‘I don’t know the difference.’

  ‘The difference?’

  ‘Between your couch and other couches.’

  ‘I see. Because you’re God?’ Dr Kleingeld was amused by the idea.

  ‘Perhaps. Probably.’

  ‘I had a man in here a little time ago who said he was God. He said he liked my couch enormously.’

  ‘That proves, if proof were needed, that he isn’t God.’

  ‘What proof have you that you are God?’

  ‘I don’t need proof. That’s the whole point.’

  There was a pause while Dr Kleingeld made a few notes.

  ‘Do you remember the Creation?’

  The Old Man hesitated. ‘What I remember would mean nothing to you.’

  ‘That’s an interesting observation. They usually repeat long passages out of Genesis, as though they had remembered the events. All they have remembered is the text.’

  ‘Whom are you referring to?’

  ‘Patients who say they’re God.’

  Kleingeld wrote a few more notes.

  ‘May I ask why you came back to Earth?’

  The Old Man reflected. ‘I don’t really know in so many words. A sudden … surprising loneliness. A desire to see for myself the peculiar variations on the theme I thought so splendid long ago. And then … it’s too difficult to put into words … for the time being. May I ask you a question?’

  ‘Of course, but I haven’t as many answers as you have.’

  ‘Do you …? You seem to believe I am … who I say I am.’

  Dr Kleingeld laughed silently. ‘I wouldn’t go as far as that,’ he said softly. ‘You know, I don’t find it very easy to believe in anything.’

  ‘That is the mark of your intelligence.’

  ‘How nice of you to say so. I am not afraid to change my mind. In fact, I encourage myself to do so, regularly. To worry my sense of the truth as a dog worries a bone. Nothing is constant. Everything changes all the time. Humans age. So do ideas. So does faith. All things are eroded by life and that is why I find it not too difficult to talk to you as though you are God without really knowing or caring much whether you are or not.’

  ‘How curious!’ said the Old Man, very much alive. ‘I never realized how embarrassing it would be to be believed. It is so unexpected. When you said just now that you don’t really care much whether I am God or not, it came as a relief after a moment of panic. You see, down on Earth, it’s so much easier to pretend to be God than to actually be Him.’

  ‘It’s easier to be considered mad than to be blamed for all that seems to have gone wrong
with the world—’

  ‘Or praised as omnipotence personified. There is no more terrible pressure than to be the object of prayers.’

  Dr Kleingeld wrote again.

  ‘May I ask the identity of your travelling companion?’

  ‘Ah!’ cried the Old Man. ‘I knew you would ask sooner or later.’ There was a brief pause. ‘You asked me why I came down to Earth after so long a time … Well, please don’t tell him, but I have had for ever so long a recurrent twinge of conscience about him … You see, I pushed him out.’

  ‘Out?’

  ‘Perhaps I am asking you to accept too much all at once – but – Heaven.’

  ‘It exists?’

  ‘Oh yes, but it isn’t quite as enviable as it has always been painted. And the solitude is at times quite oppressive.’

  ‘Solitude? You surprise me. I didn’t think you would be prone to such human vulnerabilities.’

  ‘I am alleged to have created man in my own image. I have to keep in touch, do I not? I must have the mechanism for doubt, even the capacity for joy and anguish. If I created man, I must know what I created.’

  ‘Does that mean that there are limits even to God’s imagination?’

  ‘I never thought of it like that, but of course, there must be.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because … because I can only create that which I can imagine, and there must be things I can’t imagine.’

  ‘In the universe?’

  ‘The universe is my laboratory. I’d go mad in the wide sweep of Heaven without having the universe to play with. It keeps me fresh and youthful – up to a point – but even the universe is largely there for discovery, and human interpretation, since it is made up of matter known to man. It is in the universe that the limits of my imagination become evident – but of course, immortality requires a frame just as mortality does. Mortality has the very necessary frame of death to give life its meaning. Limits to the imagination are equally necessary for immortality, for without them it would quickly become chaos, out of the sheer fatigue of eternity.’

  ‘That is most enlightening,’ muttered Dr Kleingeld, ‘but you have, of course, in the thrill of elucidation, avoided telling me who your companion is. Is it Satan?’

  ‘I thought I’d said as much.’

  ‘You did, in a way – but remember, I don’t necessarily believe all you say. Did he once work in the circus?’

  The Old Man looked mildly perplexed. ‘I have no idea. He may have done. I had lost touch with him since he … he left … up to yesterday. A circus? Why a circus?’

  ‘I don’t know. He seems to be able to make things vanish, even parts of his body, and his relationship with fire appears to be friendly. There are those who swallow fire and do tricks. They usually work in the circus.’

  ‘Tricks! He even calls them tricks. He is rather more extrovert than I am, and he likes surprising, and showing off his powers. I prefer to live like a man while on Earth, if such a possibility exists.’ He pondered. ‘I wished to see him again, after all this time. I sent a rather furtive message. He responded like a shot. We met the day before yesterday for the first time since prehistory, on the sidewalk before the Smithsonian Institute here in Washington, at twenty-three hundred hours, by mutual arrangement. We went straight to a hotel, where we were denied access because we had no luggage. We spent one night between the Smithsonian and the National Gallery.’

  ‘Which are both shut at night.’

  ‘Walls are no problem, nor are heights. What we saw encouraged me enormously about certain of man’s achievements, and bored Mr Smith almost to distraction.’

  ‘The next night you found accommodation, and had to create money in order to pay the hotel. Is that what I am to understand?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Dr Kleingeld looked at the Old Man with a look both mischievous and challenging.

  ‘The FBI brought you here for a psychiatric assessment of your sense of responsibility, or sanity if you will. We will come to the second part of the test momentarily. But first, may I ask you to make some money?’

  ‘I’m told it’s illegal.’

  ‘I don’t intend to use it. It’s just so that I can testify, in confidence of course, about your ability, or lack of it.’

  ‘How much do you need?’

  There was a glint in Dr Kleingeld’s eye. ‘If you were a normal client,’ he said, ‘my fee would be in the region of two thousand dollars per session. And judging by what you have told me so far, you would need between ten and twenty sessions before I could assess whether you needed more. As you can see, such things are terribly difficult to judge. Say thirty thousand dollars, which is a conservative estimate.’

  The Old Man concentrated hard, and suddenly money flew from his pocket like liberated pigeons. The notes fluttered all over the room, but they were not green in colour. Dr Kleingeld caught one in the air.

  ‘These are not dollars,’ he cried, out of character. ‘This is Austrian currency! Did you know I was born in Austria?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s entirely worthless. It was minted during the German occupation of Austria just before the war.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the Old Man, with some satisfaction. ‘Probably I’m not a normal client. It’s a pity, because you are really very perspicacious in other ways.’

  * * *

  It may have been animated by a spirit of revenge, or may have been merely the reckless inquisitiveness of men dedicated to research, but whichever it was, Dr Kleingeld had Luther Basing let out of his confinement and brought into his study. Luther Basing, an extremely stout young man with his hair cut close to his head and the dangerously sleepy expression of a sumo wrestler, was locally known as God Three, reputedly the most dangerous of the three.

  ‘Ah. I thought you two should meet. God Three, meet God Four.’

  Luther Basing trembled slightly as he looked at the Old Man, and he even seemed to be on the verge of tears. Dr Kleingeld briefly gestured to the two male nurses who had entered with God Three. They advanced quickly and silently, standing behind Dr Kleingeld.

  Meanwhile the Old Man and Luther Basing faced one another, locked in an ocular embrace. There was no telling yet which one would win the test of strength.

  ‘Amazing,’ murmured Dr Kleingeld to the male nurses. ‘Normally God Three would have torn into a newcomer, and destroyed him. That’s why I asked for you to come with him and stay in my study during—’

  He had not finished speaking before Luther Basing slowly lowered his enormous frame to the floor, and knelt before the Old Man.

  The Old Man advanced slowly and extended his hand. Luther Basing refused it, looking down at the floor, turning his thoughts inwards as perceptibly as though he were folding a tablecloth.

  ‘Come, let me help you up. With your great weight, I cannot allow you to kneel.’

  Meekly, Luther Basing extended a hand which looked like a bunch of stunted bananas.

  ‘The other one too. I need both.’

  Obediently, Luther extended the other hand. The Old Man took both hands in his, and with a rapid twist of the wrist lifted the huge hulk high off the floor, and held him there.

  Luther Basing screamed in a high-pitched, feminine voice, and kicked the short columns of his legs in a panic. The earth was his element, for reasons which were obvious, and he could not bear being removed from it.

  The Old Man let him down tactfully, and opened his arms to console the whimpering giant, who laid his head on the Old Man’s shoulder and made little noises for a while, like a child seeking to recover from a tantrum.

  ‘With Gods One and Two, he goes wild,’ said Dr Kleingeld, ‘and with you he is meekness itself. Why?’

  ‘In his heart of hearts, despite his arrogant claim to be God, he knows he isn’t. With the other two pretenders he knows that, although he is not God, they are not God either. The secularity of the situation brings out the belligerent in them. In my case, he recognized some quality other than arrogance, or even the desire to convince. I don’t claim to be God. I don’t need to.’ And the Old Man glanced at the immobile mammoth leaning on him. ‘He’s fallen asleep.’